How We Work

Our Attitude on Safety

We worry about safety so you don't have to! The safety of our clients' personnel, and those adjacent to our worksite always comes first. Beyond that, many of our clients take a keen interest in the safety of the construction workers. But why should they have to do that? When you buy a car, you rightly focus on the car - not the safety records from the auto plant.

When we build something for our clients, we understand that we "own" the safety responsibility for the project. And we take that ownership very seriously. With a commitment to worker safety that permeates throughout our entire company, BSI achieves safety statistics that are much better than the norm of our peers. That means our workers compensation rates are lower, which translates into lower costs for our clients. Most important, we want our trade workers to go home to their families in good health every night.

Virtually every contracting firm touts their safety program, but BSI was the first general contractor in our four state Region VII to be admitted into the OSHA Voluntary Protection Program. BSI was admitted by OSHA into this elite program after a lengthy and comprehensive process that culiminated in a detailed onsite evaluation of our commitment, practices, and results.

Our Approach to Quality

The measure of a contractor’s commitment to quality is not the process it employs, but rather the results it achieves! If you look at our history of work in our primary market, no general contracting firm has produced a greater proportion of landmark, high quality buildings than BSI Constructors. A few examples will help illustrate the point.

When BSI was selected to build The Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts (designed by Pritzker Prize winning architect Tadao Ando), the Owner’s goal was a standard of architectural concrete quality never achieved in St. Louis. Mission accomplished, according to world-renowned concrete expert Jim Shilstone who described the building as “one of the finest examples of achieving a high quality as-cast architectural concrete finish we have seen in the world.”

When the Latter Day Saints decided to build a temple in St. Louis, their reputation for an unwavering expectation of quality preceded them. BSI was one of a very small group of local general contractors approved to bid the project. BSI was awarded the contract, and according to the Director of Project Management for the Latter Day Saints, delivered the highest quality building of any he had seen in his many years of overseeing construction for the church.

When the Gateway Foundation wanted to transform the St. Louis landscape by developing a major sculpture park in the heart of downtown, they turned to BSI. In spite of a necessarily aggressive schedule, it was clear that quality would be foremost. The Gateway Foundation insisted on a meticulously constructed project that would truly withstand the test of time. According to principal architect Warren Byrd of Nelson Byrd Woltz “As nationally recognized landscape architects we have worked on numerous notable projects throughout the United States and overseas. I can state, without reservation that of all of our public and commercial works, this has been both the most satisfying and the most beautifully constructed.”

Obviously, we don’t achieve these types of results without extensive quality assurance procedures and testing protocols. But it by taking ownership of the finished product, and maintaining a corporate culture committed to doing the right thing, that facilitates the construction of exceptional structures.

What We Self Perform

Our roots are as an old style general contractor that self performs a significant proportion of its work. The trend in the industry has been towards “management only” contractors who rely on subcontractors for all of the execution. We highly value the relationships with our subcontractors, and recognize their critical role in construction. However, BSI is committed to maintaining the ability to self perform key components of the work. Even when it is the best interest of the project to subcontract a work category that we are capable of self-performing, our detailed knowledge of how to actually do the work is invaluable in securing the right price. And when the market doesn’t respond as we’d like, we are very capable of jumping in with our own tradesmen to execute the work in a cost-effective and high quality manner. During preconstruction, a real builder can be much more effective than a broker in evaluating proposed design details for constructability and cost effectiveness.